TL/DR:
- A client spent 5 years wanting to start a business. After 3 coaching sessions, he launched and signed 2 clients.
- Action comes first, and confidence follows.
- The unglamorous skills (working with your tendencies, reducing distractions, building a trusted system, practicing prioritization) are what build the evidence that you’re capable.
- You’re not waiting on readiness. You’re waiting on a stack of small wins that prove you can.
The Whole Shebang:
Just the other day, as we were wrapping up our 4th coaching session, my client said “hey, I wanted to tell you something!”
Intrigued, I leaned in.
When we’re already in conversation, usually people just keep talking.
But the preamble made me think: “This is going to be important”.
And it was.
My client said:
“So, for probably 5 years, I’ve wanted to start a business, but I didn’t have the confidence to believe I could pull it off.”
“But last week, I started the business, and I’ve already signed on 2 clients”.”
“And I wanted you to know that it’s our work together that’s given me the confidence that I can actually make this business work.”
5 years of thinking about it.
Then only 3 coaching sessions before he took action.
So, what was going on for him in the last several weeks that wasn’t present in the last 5 years?
Look, as I think you know, I’m not a business coach; we hadn’t been working on a business plan together. Heck, I literally didn’t even know he wanted to start a business.
What had we been doing together?
- Identifying his natural traits and tendencies so we could work with them instead of against them.
- Identifying distractors and implementing strategies to reduce them
- Building out a single trusted system for all his tasks and projects so he doesn’t have to reply on memory, or random scraps of paper.
- Practicing prioritization
This is practical, unglamorous stuff.
AND, building these skills, and your confidence in these skills, is what takes you from “someday, maybe” to “I’m actually doing this right now”.
My client? Over the past several week he’d watched himself make progress, follow through on the little things.
So the story he was telling to himself, about himself, started to shift.
Through consistent action, he gain confidence.
And that’s the kicker here.
Often we believe that we have to somehow find the confidence before we embark on something new.
But it’s action that build confidence.
You don’t wait for confidence to appear. You start doing the things and the confidence follows.
All of a sudden, you’re sitting on a mountain of evidence that “Yes, you can” (because you already have).
Now, would this client have gotten there on his own? Without the support and structure of coaching?
Maybe. Who knows.
But it certainly would have been slower.
What we do know, is that he went from 5 years of thinking about it, not sure he could ever make it happen, to taking action within several weeks of starting coaching.
Coaching, of course, isn’t a magic wand. (But boy would I have a different business model if it did!!)
It doesn’t hand you the confidence to make your dreams come true on a silver platter.
But, it creates the right conditions for success: structure, accountability, a focus on growth and a mirror to help you see yourself more clearly and reflect back to you the evidence of growth you might not see in yourself.
Is there something you’ve been wanting to do? Wanting to start? But you’ve been afraid to put yourself out there because you’re afraid of failure? Because you don’t yet feel ready?
Whatever that thing is, it’s likely more within your grasp than you think.
You might just need a little structure, and someone in your corner, to start building the (unsexy) skills that will give you the confidence that actually, you can do anything.